24 THE LAST F AMIL Y COUNTESS M ì: Y mother's people were not titled, but when I think back to them and to my childhood, I understand that one of their tacit con- cerns was maintaining some sort of kinship with a member of the Italian nobility. In her family, there had al- ways been the institution of an aunt who was at least a countess. As for my father's family, none of them even knew what it was to care for titles. This was so because their traditional pride was that not of landed but of maritime people. They could have flourished a genealogy of old black-bearded sea capta1ns, the mere list of whose ships lost at sea would have been enough to make my mother's country family, with their spurious aristocratic whims, respectful. My mother herself, poor thing, having inherited a tenderness for nohility from her landowning ancestors, never really had much time to cultivate it, so numerous were the reverses and hardsh1ps of her bfe. Yet th1s weakness, combined with her faith in the mira"cles of Providence, often consoled her and helped her to meet her difficult times with courage. The family's last titled aunt, a count- ess, I remember very well, because I met her for the first and onl) time ten years ago, just after the end of the war, though I had known all about her from my earliest childhood, much in the way I was made to know the bfe, death, and miracles of the chief saints. The Count- ess was not strictly an aunt, but my two younger sisters and I spoke of her as "aunt" by habit, and it is not easy for me to explain the exact relationship between my mother and her. There was, of course, some blood tie; in fact, accord- ing to m} mother, there were two of these, because somewhere in the family connection two brothers had married two sisters One of t e brothers and one of the sisters had, in time, died, and the widow and widower had end- ed by marrying each other. Our count- ess aunt, Marina, was born of one of the original unions, and a cousin of ours, a notary, who often came to visit my mother, was born of the second marriage, and was therefore the Count- ess's half brother. This circumstance of the Countess's being doubly a relative could only add to the prestige my s1sters and I felt as custodians of the moral in- heritance that came from having kin in high places. Besides all this, our titled aunt was very rich. At the death of the Count, her husband, she had entered into possession of an estate at Poggio, in Tuscany, where she bved with a son, Piero, and a daughter, Matilda, in a sixteenth- century villa surrounded by vast parks full of ancient lawns, fountains, and avenues of cypresses. Her Tuscan hold- ings were as large dS all the lands my mother's family had let go after the First World War That famil) lived with the1r heads so much in the clouds that none of them noticed the devalua- tion of money that had taken place, and they sold their land in the cheerful con- viction that they were making a large profit. And so, while our countess aunt prospered, my mother's family steadily dechned. But it 1S always a consola- tion to the poor to know that they have rich relatives-even if, as almost always happens, the nch ones are so avid that they will not let a crumb fall to the poor ones, preferring to give that crumb to almost anyone else. To do otherwise constitutes a dangerous prec- edent and confirms a bond of kinship that it is to the advantage of the rich to 19nore. But, according to my mother, such forgetfulness was not the custom of our countess aunt-a charitable woman who was bound to my mother by mem- ories of their childhood together If she never sent gifts-not even a demi- john or so of olive oil or a keg of Chianti del Poggio, from her own property- it was because, all things considered, we were not really too badly off. She would not want to put us in the position of having to repay favors, my mother said, and, above all, it would not be delicate to send us the produce of her own lands, as if to remind us sar- castically that we, too, had once been landowners, with products of our own. These shadings of delicacy that my mother attributed to the Countess re- ,;ulted in making her more dear than " 4<< j I ;lIUu . lï;iûr AJ.' j' , .' ::R';6::' : r, DECEMßEI\ 2, 9, I 9 5 ever in the fantasy my sisters and I made of her. My father d1ed in the First World War, and soon afterward the woes of disposing of my mother's family estate were integrated, so to speak, with those of dispos1ng of his. I became head of the family at the age of ten and, along with my mother (who understood these problems no better than I, at the time), inherited not property hut usufructuary snares-worthless bonds, lapsed pen- sions, mortgages, nghts of option, and overdue leases. These terms, learned in that distant epoch, can even now knot my stomach whenever I hear them. In this situation, it was natural that the thought of our countess aunt should be- gin to float like a white cloud of spring on our desolate horizon, a promise of ever-poss1ble beneficent rain for our dried-up lands. H OWEVER much the Countess might be occupied in the admin- istration and duties of her high state (the phrase invariably used by her lead- en half brother, the notary, when he called on us), she never failed to answer our Christmas and Easter greetings, or to commemorate my mother's name day, the Feast of Santa Lucia, by send- ing her an artistic card, in color. The card was always a reproduction of some celebrated sacred painting, and the mes- sage on the back of it always went more or less like this: "To my dear Lucia, imploring upon her and her youngsters the celestial benedictions and the peren- n1al assistance of her sainted namesake; in the memory of our deceased mothers, who were like sisters, and of our own shared childhood at Breganze, I am, with the same true and sisterly affection, your Marina." " M . " f . d anna, or my s1sters an me, meant Marina Sal vanelli, the Countess T orrimpetto del Poggio de Salibassi, and when my mother received one of her cards, we complacently felt that for another year, at least, we were un- der her spiritual protection. The notary, an idle, gossipy, pedantic man, com- peted with all the other relatives in esti- tnating the gradations of the affection his sister distributed among them, and, being capable of loving only his habits, he loved us, by habit, from year to year, simpl) as a result of her benevolence toward us. He felt both pride and Jeal- ousy for his sister, and never forgot to remind us that she was named Marina in memory of an earlier countess aunt, Marina Marini di V al vecchia. "Now, she was a countess of really high lin- eage," he would say, "so, of course, when m) S1ster was held by her at